Myers coined
telepathy as a hypothesis to create distance from the survival weakly espoused
by Spiritualists. Phantasms were of the living, not the dead, and psychical.
phenomena of the séance could be explained under the rubrics of abnormal
psychology and dissociated states. Myers's concept of subliminal consciousness
opened a space between Spiritualism and psychical research in the 1880s. After
his death, Myers became the means by which psychism was substantially
reabsorbed into Spiritualism, at least in the public mind, for the Myers that
returned was committed to defeating the view that his survival was merely an
effect of telepathic effluvia picked up by sensitives from their living
sitters. Ironically, telepathy was a hypothesis that might now threaten the
surviving Myers.

The
most dramatic instance of Myers's role in the resurgence of Spiritualism came
in the middle of the Great War. Lodge published Raymond in 1916, a memorial to
his son killed at the front in 1915 that became a best-selling book. It was
divided into a'Normal'section of Raymond's letters home, and a
"Supernormal" section in which Raymond communicated with the Lodge
family. Ten days after his death, Lodge's wife attended a s6ance with Mrs
Leonard in which an unrelated transmission was interrupted with 'TELL FATHER I
HAVE MET SOME FRIENDS OF HIS. MYERS. (Oliver Lodge, Raymond: Or, Life and
Death, 1916, p.97-8.)

Two
days later she was told that Myers was "helping your son communicate"
with the purpose of strengthening Lodge's courage "to ride over the
quibbles of fools, and to make the Society, the Society, he says, of some use
to the world." (Typed transcripts ,17 Mar. 1902).

Lodge
was convinced of Myers' intercessory role when a message from Myers in August
1915 appeared to predict Raymond's death (after some decoding). (This became
known as the "Faunus"message. For exposition, see ibid. 95)

In
his first sitting with the medium Peters, Lodge received messages from Raymond,
intermixed with the spirits of Myers and Stead.

Theodor
Adorno, one of the principal theorists of the aesthetics of Modernism, termed
occultism "the metaphysic of dunces," Occult beliefs were the product
of alienation, but only further mystified the magic of commodity fetishism.
("Theses against Occultism," in Minima Meralia,
London 1974, p.240)

Adorno's
notes, written in 1945, hinted at associations of the occult with fascism:

"The
hypnotic power exerted by things occult resembles totalitarian terror," he suggested."There is much evidence to support
this association."

Brenda
Maddox sees Yeats's late renewal of occult interests within the same spectrum
as his fascist dalliances in the 1930S. ( Brenda Maddox, Georgie's Ghosts: A
New Life of W. B. Yeats, London: Picador, 1999).

Ezra
Pound's Cantos have been seen as a vehicle for a concealed occult history, in
similar vein to his fascist identifica. (See Leon Surette, The Birth of
Modernism: Ezra Pound, T S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult, Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993)

Earlier
in Italy, Marinetti's celebration of the conjuncture of human and tens machine,
envisioning bodies "endowed with surprising organs," was linked to
"the phenomena of externalized will that continually reveal themselves at
spiritualist seances." (F. T. Marinetti, "Multiplied Man and the
Reign of the Machine," in Let's Murder the
Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. F.W. Flint, p.99.)

I
have learnt not to trust apparently stable valences nor simply pathologize the
occult. The Edwardian occult revival touched on many of the central English and
European Modernists in different ways. It was seen as one avenue of revolt
against Western cultural tradition and against scientistic thinking. The
subliminal subject that emerged in Modernism through an interest in ecstatic or
automatic states of mind was not so easily identifiable as a marginal or
occultist concept. (See: The Quest for a New Man )

There
were many interconnections between London's literary and occult circles in the
early 1900’s. A.R. Orage, a vector for Nietzschean ideas into England, fused the
fiberniensch with Theosophical supernaturalization of the Will, claiming in
Consciousness that "the main problem of the mystics of all ages has been
the problem of how to develop the superconsciousness, of how to become
supermen." (A.R. Orage, Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman.
London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1907, p.72.)

In
1907, Orage took over the New Age magazine, and many Modernists wrote for him,
including T S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and Ezra Pound. (Philip Mairet, A.R.
Orage: A Memoirt, 1936, and Paul Selver, Orage and the New Age Circle,,
1959).

Orage
read Piotr Ouspensky's Symbolism of the Tarot and Tertium Organuin in 1913 and
paved the way for Ouspensky's visit to London in 1921. Ouspensky had by then
submitted himself to the telepathically asserted will of his fellow Russian
mystic George Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff followed his disciple to London in January
1922, to present the esoteric practice that filled out Ouspensky's occult
theory.

This
prompted Orage to abandon the New Age for the Institute for the Harmonious
Development of Man in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. The Institute was funded by
Lady Rothermere in the same year that she underwrote Eliot's new journal
Criterion. It was here that Katherine Mansfield died in January 1923, sometimes
portrayed as the dying Trilby to the mesmeric foreign charlatan
Svengall/Gurdjleff. This "Levantine psychic shark," as Wyndham Lewis
called him, nevertheless attracted other Modernists to sample the dubious
primitive conditions and ecstatic dancing of the Institute, including
Diaghilev, Sinclair Lewis, a disgusted D. H. Lawrence, and a dedicated Margaret
Anderson from the influential magazine the Little Review in New York. (James
Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield, 1980, p. 198.)

Another
circle formed around G. R. S. Mead, who had been Madame Blavatsky's secretary
and edited Lucifer before leaving Theosophy to establish more eclectic pursuits
under the auspices of the Quest Society. This attracted a cross-section of the
intelligentsia, including Yeats, Dorothy Shakespear and Pound, Rebecca West and
Harriet Weaver (founder of the New Freewoman, which became the Egoist), the
Theosophical mythographer Jessie Weston, the Jewish philosopher and mystic
Martin Buber, and even the anti-mystic Modernists Wyndham Lewis and T. E.
Hulme.

Theosophical
thinking was a central influence on the designs and colours of Wassily
Kandinsky, who published On the Spiritual in Art in 1912, in which the artist
is held to be "attuned to ...subtler vibrations" and art itself can
"safeguard the soul from coarsening its frequency." ( 1946, p.11.)
Selections from this were translated in Blast in 1914.

Another
grouping attended the salon of Catherine Dawson Scott, including the theologian
Evelyn Underhill (whose book Mysticism in 1911 gained wide coverage), her close
friend the writer May Sinclair, and the poet Charlotte Mew. Dawson Scott went
on to found the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors,
Essayists and Novelists (PEN) in 1924, whilst carrying on a parallel career as
a Spiritualist automatist, publishing messages from the august dead. (C.A.
Dawson Scott, From Four Who Are Dead, 192). For details, see Penelope
Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and her Friends, 1984) and Suzanne Raitt, May
Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, Oxford University Press, 2000).

The
seances conducted by Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge had been taken through
the courts by 1922, and H.D. and Bryher were at the beginning of their mystical
séance investigations.

Hermetic
magic and Russian mystics from Blavatsky to Gurdjieff abhorred Spiritualism.
They trained the Will to superhuman feats; trance-states and occupation by
spirits were degenerative. Typically, Yeats existed on both sides of this
divide. He returned to seance researches in 1911, under the auspices of the
American SPR, chaired by the Spiritualist J. H. Hyslop.

Yeats
sat with Mrs. Chenowith, who was in contact with a number of spirits, including
Myers and Hodgson. In 1912, Yeats attended a seance with Mrs Wriedt at Stead's
Bureau, and received his first message from Leo Africanus, the
"anti-self" that generated so much poetry and theory. Arnold Goldman
suggests that Yeats's sceptical report on Leo and trials in automatism with
Elizabeth Radcliffe brought him closer to more interrogative SPR rigour.
(Arnold Goldman, "Yeats, Spiritualism, and Psychical Research," in
George Harper Mills (ed.), Yeats and the Occult, 1975).

Yeats
lectured to the SPR on "Ghosts and Dreams" in 1913, but also
confessed a year later that his seance work did not have "evidence the
Society of Psychical Research would value." ( Peter Kuch, "Laying the
Ghosts?" W B. Yeats' "Lecture on Ghosts and Dreams," Yeats
Annual, 5 , 1987, and "Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places," in W
B. Yeats, If I were Four-and-Twenty, 1940).

A
Vision, his astrological, magical, eschatological synthesis received through
his wife's automatic hand between 1917 and 1922 (along with much useful
contraceptive advice), would confirm Yeats's own Judgement on the marginal
importance of evidential value against the mythopoeic potentialities of the
trance-state.

Yeats's
indiscriminate occult enthusiasms tend to encourage elision of different
strands of thinking at the time. Other Modernists interested in exploring
states of subjectivity made more rigorous distinctions. Whilst abhorring
spiritualistic or Theosophical credulity, many still relied on the discourses
of mysticism and psychical research. Suzanne Raitt has argued that scholars
should "take mysticism as at least as involved as psychology in the
generation of modern literary method."

William
James devoted two lectures in his Varieties of Religious Experience to mystical
experiences, defining them as transient, fugitive, and ineffable but also
imparting senses of cosmic connectedness. Myersian terminology located
mysticism within "that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which
science is beginning to admit the existence." (1902, p. 426)

The
theologian Evelyn Underhill investigated the mystical as transcending the
personal, losing the boundedness of selfhood. The experience was "a
process of sublimation which carries the correspondences of the self with the
Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal consciousness
works." ( Evelyn Underhill, The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays,
p. 6.)

These
descriptions connect to the Joycean epiphany or Woolfian "moment of
being"-what T. S. Eliot termed states of soul, "which are to be found
... only beyond the limit of the visible spectrum of human feeling, and which
can be experienced only in moments of illumination, or by the development of
another organ of perception other than that of everyday vision." (T S.
Eliot."Preface" to Thoughts for Meditation, 1951, cited Paul Murray,
T S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of the Four Quartets1991, p.168.)

Eliot's
metaphor of the spectrum and new organs echoes Myers fairly precisely, linking
the articulation of mystical states back to terminologies of psychical
research. Tom Gibbons has claimed direct borrowing from Myers in one of D. H.
Lawrence's most cited passages on his new approach to character. Writing to
Edward Garnett in 1914 Lawrence warned that "the old stable ego"
coexisted with "another ego."

These
were in "allotropic states," as diamond and
coal were differcut forms of carbon. The term "allotropic" and the
carbon metaphor are repeated from Myers's Human Personality. (See Toni Gibbons,
"'Allotropic States' and 'Fiddle-Bow': D. H. Lawrence's Occult Sources,"
Notes and Queries, 2, 33, 1988, p.339)

Lawrence,
contemptuous of Ouspenskian mysticism or Freudianism, relied on Myersian terms
for psychical states because these shared his disgust of mechanical or
reductionist accounts for more dynamic, inherently metaphorical language. One
of the most outspoken critics of the limits of scientific models ofmind was the
philosopher Henri Bergson, whose work became important in English intellectual
culture after 1911.

Bergson
criticized mechanistic thinking, particularly in evolutionary theory,
contrasting continuities of the instinctual mind with the limited,
discontinuous processes of the intellect. Intellect was a "luminous
nucleus," which threw deep shadows, and it was the "vague
nebulosity" on which Bergson focused. (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution,
trans. Arthur Mitchell 1990, 1998, 177.)

Bergson
conceived the Myers mind in terms very similar to Myers, but then had been in
contact with since the foundation of the SPR. The more I think of your
observations, Bergson wrote to Myers in 1886, "the less I can explain
these phenomena to myself otherwise than by transmission of thought."

In
1913, when Bergson became president of the SPR, the arguments in his
presidential address were continuous with Creative Evolution: mental life was
"much more vast than the cerebral life" to which scientists limited
it; telepathy probably existed on the "fringe of perceptions most often
unconscious," and was discarded by most psychologists; the idea "of a
consciousness overflowing the organism" might account for how "the
soul survives the body." ( Henri Bergson,
"Phantasms of the Living" and "Psychical Research": Address
to the SPR, 28 May 1913, in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon
Carr, 1920, 79, 77 and 78.)

In
her philosophical essay A Defence of Idealism, May Sinclair complained that the
spiritual, the psychic, the magical, and the supernatural had become entangled
in recent times, an effect she blamed on a penumbra created by the aggression
of scientific naturalism. Sinclair is one of the best exemplars, however, of
the productive potential of these overlapping knowledges in the 19l0’s.
Sinclair had begun her career in the 1880’s, but in the new century became an
early supporter of Ezra Pound, defended Imagist poetry, T S. Eliot's
"Prufock" (she had some influence on his later work, too), and
Dorothy Richardson's experiments in "stream of consciousness." In
1911, she began writing a sequence of supernatural stories, initially for the
English Review. Collected as Uncanny Tales in 1923, they eschew the language of
ghosts and hauntings for the terms "phantasm" and
"apparition." (See Rebeccah Kinnamon Neff, "New Mysticism in the
Writings of May Sinclair and T S. Eliot," Twentieth Century Literature,
26, 1980.)

These
presences are generated by extreme mental states, are mixed up with projective
powers of mind, and are attended by dissolutions of boundaries between selves.

In
"The Flaw in the Crystal," Agatha Verrall uses her projective healing
Gift, "a current of transcendent power," to salve nervous
collapses.(1912, p.200)

Ecstasy
is touching the "innermost essence" of the other, when "the
walls of flesh were down." (Ibid, 201) Terror lies in the corruption or
reversibility of this touch: her insane neighbour switches selves with her,
leaving her nerves "charged ... to a pitch of insane and horrible
sensibility," where the world is seen as populated by "strange
shiverings, swarmings, crepitations ... of things that creep and writhe towards
dissolution." The "flaw" of the title is Agatha's mixing of a
transcendent Gift with earthly desire. This is an overdetermined narrative for
Sinclair, the conjuncture of her interests offering at least three frames for
the tale. The corruption of Agatha's Gift conforms to Evelyn Underhill's
warnings that mystical communion can be undermined by desires emanating from
the "lower centres."

Underhill's
Mysticism thanked Sinclair in the acknowledgements.In another way, Sinclair
mines an unstable borderland between the categories of the magical and the
spiritual. Nobody could deny, she commented in A Defence of Idealism, that
"the region of telepathy, and of suggestion and auto-suggestion, and
of 'psychic phenomena' generally I . . is a region of utmost uncertainty
and danger." Yet she defended the admirable work of the SPR, which she
Joined in 1914. (May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and
Conclusions, 1917, 283 and 294.)

May
Sinclair helped finance the Medico-psychological Clinic in Bloomsbury in 1913,
one of the first English institutions where Freudian psychoanalysis was used in
treatments, so Sinclair is known for her examination of the ambiguities of
sexual constraint in Mary Olivier and Life and Death onHarriett Frean-regarded
as "psychoanalytic" novels.

The
Medico-psychological Clinic, though, used an eclectic mix of psychological
theories, from Janet and Jung as much as Freud. Two psychologists associated
with the Clinic included Hector Munro, who claimed to be a psychic and have
"the psychic's uncanny power over certain people," and William
McDougall, who soon became president of the SPR. (Details of Sinclair's
involvement in Raitt, May Sinclair.)

She
also later wrote a short preface for Catherine Dawson Scott's From Four Who Are
Dead, undecided between psychical and Spiritualist explanations for the
automatic script. (May Sinclair, "The Flaw in the Crystal," English
Review, 11 1912, p.200.)

These
kinds of conjuncture, where telepathy, mystical communion, supernatural
"possession," and sexual transference overlay each other, became
nodal points for Modernist investigations of the limits of consciousness. H.D.,
recovering from a severe breakdown following the death of her brother in
France, had a mystical experience of connecting with the "over-mind"
in 1919. Her account left Havelock Ellis unimpressed," yet her
"crystal-gazing" vision, three years later, was psychically shared
with her partner Bryher and they examined it for years afterwards. This
"hieroglyph of the unconscious" stayed at the centre of her sessions
with Freud in 1933, an encounter in which the ghostly hovers in and out of
literal and metaphorical resonance. (H.D., Tribute to Freud, 1970, p. 93.)

In
1933 Andre Breton reconceived the role of automatism in Surrealism, displacing
Freud from sole proprietorship of the unconscious. Breton recalled that
Schrenck-Notzing had discussed the "aesthetic" of hysteria in 1889,
before adding: "And in spite of the regrettable fact that so many are
unacquainted with the work of F. W H. Myers, which anteceded that of Freud, I
think we owe more than is generally conceded to what William James justly
called the gothic psychology of F." W H. Myers: Breton committed
Surrealism to 'the Myers problem (strictly psychological): the determination of
the precise nature of the subliminal'." David Lomas has downplayed the
place of Myers in Surrealism, noting that Human Personality was not translated
into French until 1925, the year after the First Manifesto of Surrealism
defined it as "pure psychic automatism," and the Surrealists
themselves as "modest recording devices" for "thought dictated
in the absence of all control exercised by reason" (Andre Breton,"The
Automatic Message"1933, in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and introd,
Franklin Rosemont 1978, p.100.)

Yet
the four essays which Myers published on automatic writing in the PSPR in
1885-6 were influential assessments of the psychiatric import of automatism.
Sonu Shamdasani has shown how automatic writing and the subliminal
consciousness it revealed offered a writing cure alongside Freud's talking
cure-that automatic writing and "Its" unconscions was an
"other" unconscious explored at the time." Elisabeth Roudinesco
also claims that Breton had already read the works of Janet, Myers, Richet ...
and Flournoy's "From India to Planet Mars" by 1922. (Elisabeth
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France
ig.25-85, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, 1990, p.22.)

Breton
was tactically revising the Surrealist lineage, but the place of Myers was no
retroactive falsification. Much later in life Breton still emphasized Myers's
"beautiful work" in Surrealist researches. (Andre Breton,
Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Potizzotti, 1990,
p.6o.)

Surrealism,
Breton claimed, was a movement that had emerged from the hypnogogic borderland
between sleep and waking, where reverie dismantled rational control of the
stream of thought. This was the moment of maximum permeability in the threshold
of sub/liminality explored by Myers. Breton and Phillippe Soupault composed The
Magnetic Fields, recording disjointed thought processes in 1919. The
"epoch of trances" began in September 1922, when Rene Crevel returned
to the group to report on what he described as "the beginnings of a
'spiritualist initiation' in which he developed "mediumistic
qualities." He passed into trances from which he wrote and spoke automatic
texts. Robert Desnos was the most adept at receiving this "magic
dictation." ( A. Breton, "The Mediums Enter" 1924, in The Lost Steps,
trans. Mark Polizzotti, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 92.)

The
group would gather for seances, but Breton insisted that loftily refuse to
admit that any communication whatsoever can exist between the living and the
dead.

In
seeking the revolutionary disorder of the subliminal mind, however, Surrealism
belonged, as Elisabeth Roudinesco suggests, to a wider occult less through any
adherence to the mystical ornaments of occultism than through the way in which
it manifested a clandestine, nocturnal and "accursed" vision of the
doctrines it defended. (See Tim Armstrong, "Distracted Writing," in
Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Stud, Cambridge University
Press, 1998.)

Automatism
was at the core of the split within Surrealism in 1929. Laurent Jenny and
others have observed that revolutionary automatism was stymied by its
Passivity. Other Modernist experimenters who used automatic writing-such passiv
as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams-saw it not as an end, but a
starting point. Breton expelled most of the automatists and Salvador Dali's
paranoiac-critical method prevailed for the next decade. Nevertheless, the
generative possibilities of games of chance, such as cadavre exquis, where
texts or images created by different players are then juxtaposed, were retained
long after this split. The uncanny links found between players, the
"strange possibility of thought, that of its pooling [mise en
commun]," haunted Breton, and he pursued "the idea of a tacit
communication-occurring only in waves-between the participants." (Both
cited Lomas, The Haunted Self, p.68.) The game of the cadavre exquis might as
well have been an invention of Myers, f Myers-but the posthumous Myers, the one
busy directing his collages of cross-correspondences between mediums.

CROSS-CORRESPONDENCE
AND COLLAGE

The
collage technique was first used by Picasso in 1912, and was communicated to
Italy, where Marinetti defined parole en liberta in the "Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature" in the same year. Collage was the
exemplary avant-garde technique: it breached the aesthetic frame by directly
incorporating the real, it disrupted distinctions of figure and ground, and
posed questions about authorial originality. (For definition of avant-garde
practice, see Peter Burger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw,
Manchester University Press, 1984. For figure/ground and issues of originality,
see Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist
Myths, Cambridge, 1985).

On
this last point, Marinetti contended that parole en liberta might "Destroy
the I in literature: that is, all psychology." In this respect, collage
has been associated with a "hard" Modernism which disdained
interiorized, Romantic psychological investigations in favour of surface
juxtapositions. This would place it in opposition to the subliminal experiments
of a "soft" Modernism. 70 yet even here, calls like those of T. E.
Hulme for a "discontinuous poetry" of images "juxtaposed asyntactically"
had been anticipated by the audacious posthumous experiment being conducted by
Myers.

These
cross-correspondences began in 1901 when Myers started communicating through a
number of mediums simultaneously. Mrs. Holland (that is, Alice Kipling) in
India read Myers's Human Personality and soon after began to receive automatic
texts signed TWHM. One contained an injunction to send her script to Mrs.
Verrall in Cambridge, a neighbour o f Myers and a classicist who lectured at
Newnham College. She had begun receiving automatic messages from Myers in Latin
and Greek. With Richard Hodgson already in contact with Myers via Mrs Piper in
Boston, the SPR were aware of three routes to Myers. More were to come: Mrs
Willett received elaborations ofunfinished chapters of Human Personality in
1909. (See Gerald Balfour, A Study of the Psychological Aspects of Mrs
Willett's Mediumship, and of the Statements of the Communicators Concerning
Process, PSPR, 43 ,1935)

It
took another prompt from Myers-to "superpos[e] certain things on others,
when all would be clear"-for the investigators to understand that the
messages dispersed between mediums began to cohere when juxtaposed. Alice
Johnson explained in the first of many reports in the PSPR that:

What
we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script, which seems to have no
particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other of
an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that
they supplement one another, and thereis apparently one idea underlying both,
but only partially expressed in each. (Alice Johnson, "On the Automatic
Writing of Mrs. Holland." PSPR 21 .1908, 374 and 75.)

The
complexity of these tests was taken as a sign of an animating intelligence,
although a new notation for Myers's multiplied self was required, the
particular medium being appended in subscript to his name. Myersh, Myersp, and
Myers\were held to present slightly different aspects of Myers due to
contamination from the communicator (Myers did once complain at his "reluctant
and obtuse secretary" who mangled his dictations). (Cited by H.F.
Saltmarsh, Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross-Correspondences, 1938,
p.54.)

William
Barrett felt that it was "a sort of dream or truncated personality that
presents itself" in these scripts, yet it was "highly probable"
that they represented fragments of Myers. (William Barrett,
"Introdnction" to H.A. Dallas, Mors janna Vitae? A Discussion Of the
Certain Communications Purporting to Come from Frederic W. Myers, 1910, p.
xviii.)

It
was the contents of the messages that clinched it for many investigators. These
were allusive, fragmentary literary and classical references that echoed
Myers's career as classicist and poet, yet reorganized his sources into a
collage that seemed to abandon any logical articulation between the fragments.
An early cross-correspondence involved Myers, suggesting that investigators
look out for "Hope Star and Browning." Sure enough, a trance-text
from Myersv two weeks earlier fitted the bill. It was reproduced in full by G.
Piddington p.76.

Piddington's
annotations decode "Hope," "Star," and "Browning"
from this text, with "Aster" initiating a series of puns around
stars, heavenly wonders, and constellations, mixed in with fragmentary
citations front Browning's The Ring and the Book (And all a wonder and a wild
desire and "On the earth the broken sounds/threads"), associations to
Blake and classical sources. The diagram seems to posit a technique of reading
that triangulates hidden connections, and thus "completes the arc."
This was only the beginning of the analysis of links that weaved to and fro
across the Atlantic, threading together classical philosophy and English
poetry. The medium Mrs Verrall even wrote a brief note for the Modern Language
Review on Tennyson's echoing of Plotinus in In Memoriam, although she did not
reveal that this had been communicated through automatic texts from Myers. (See
Mrs. Verrall, "A Possible Reminiscence of Plotirms in Tennyson."
Modern Language Review, 2/4,1907.)

Early
in the twentieth century the posthumous Myers had led psychical research a
longway from scientific experiment. His surviving spirit seemed intent on
turning the discipline towards a form of literary
hermeneutics.

So
complex were the chains of association, echo, and elision in the Myers scripts
that reports were typically 400 or 500 pages long. These texts evoke Roland
Barthes's famous avant-garde assertion that the writerly text is nothing more
than a tissue of quotations, with the Author an illusory after-effect. But
doesn't the intent of the SPR to install an animating consciousness behind
these textual marks contravene thealm ofcollage? To its subsequentart
theorists, perhaps, but one of the earliest practitioners of papiers coils, the
Futurist Severeni, spoke of it as driven by "the need, at the time, to
comprehend the sense of a more profound and secret inner reality, which would
have been born from the contrast of the materials." (Severeni, cited
Marjorie Perloff, "The Invention of Collage," in The Futurist Moment:
Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, University of Chicago
Press, 1986, p.45-6.)

This
realigns collage techniques with parallel kinds of "occult"
hermeneutic-in the broad sense of practices dedicated to unveiling the hidden.
And this gnostic trawl through fragments of the cultural tradition also
connects to the contemporaneous projects undertaken by Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot.

Modernist
anthropology and primitivism linked up with esoteric study, which sought to
recover a lost, ancient gnosis from scattered, elusive fragments. Mead's
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten is not that far from Pound's speculations on the
origins of the poetic Tradition, buried in "a Babylonian and Hittite
tradition whereof knowledge is for the most part lost." This search for
origins is what prompted Pound's researches into the troubadour poets (on which
he lectured to the Quest Society in 1913), whilst a suspicion of the West
directed investigations intojapanese and Chinese forms. Pound's first Canto is
a ritual invocation of the dead, whose passing shades populate his epic. For
Leon Surette, the Cantos is an occultist document, exoteric fragments plucked
from a hidden esoteric tradition, a great intertextual fabric reaching from
remotest antiquity to the present', but whose meaning is "fully possessed
only by a few extraordinary mortals." T.S. Eliot explicitly advocated the
method ofesoteric underpinning. Injoyce's Ulysses myth gives "a shape and
a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history." Eliot's shoring of fragments in The Waste Land has
been read through Jessie Weston's essay From Ritual to Romance (the connection
was made early, the New Statesman commenting that "Miss Weston is clearly
a theosophist and Mr Eliot's poem might be a theosophical tract").
(Review, cited Surette, The Birth of Modernism, 235.)

If
this ignores Eliot's parody of contemporary flotsam of the occult, however
accurate his knowledge of the Tarot pack actually was. (Tom Gibbons has
suggested that Eliot was likely to have included imagery from A E. Waite's The
Pictorial Key of the Tarot (ign) in The Waste Land. "The Waste Land Tarot
Identified Journal of Modern Literature, 2 ,1972.)

The
Waste Land still evokes a kind of "occultist" response. The allusive
fragments promise an esoteric meaning, a coherence just beyond the threshold of
readerly competence. To reach that, Eliot suggests, is to be initiated into
Tradition, which ensures (like mystic training) "a continual extinction of
the personality" and sets the poet "among the dead." The reader
of The Waste Land is left only with confusedly reanimated voices from beneath
the ground, overlapping and fragmentary like s6ance voices-or like the allusive
textual traces of a Myers pluralized and dispersed in the
cross-correspondences. Michael Levenson has called The Waste Land "a kind
of ghost story" iIn which "to take seriously the loss of clear
boundaries between life and death and to acknowledge the disembodied character of
consciousness is to approach the extent of the poem's formal provocation."
In fact, the readerly experience of Pound and Eliot might well be recalled in
the warning H.F. Saltmarsh issued to perusers of the cross-correspondence
material: "many of them are extremely complicated, most involve reference
to classical and literary topics and in some instances the evidential value
turns upon some subtle point of classical scholarship or literary criticism, so
that it may be doubted whether the full strength can be appreciated by the
reader who is not versed in these subjects." (Salmarslh, Evidences of
Personal Survival from Cross-correspondences, p. 39.)

Anglo-American
Modernism in this strain risked, rather like psychical research, becoming an
insular arcana of a self-involved elite.